“Afraid?”
“It’s plain enough, I should think, why he may be. It’s a dreadful remembrance. Besides that, his loss of himself grew out of it. Not knowing how he lost himself, or how he recovered himself, he may never feel certain of not losing himself again. That alone wouldn’t make the subject pleasant, I should think.”
—Charles Dickens,
Tale of Two Cities
THE SKY BEYOND THE curtains had been dark for hours, and the clock on the bedside table read 10:30, when the traditional Solville knock sounded on the door: rap-rap-rap, rap, in the rhythm of the Rolling Stones’ “Under My Thumb.”
Angelica was sitting on the carpet in front of the television, and she put down her jar of pennies. “Peek out anyway,” she told Kootie as she straightened her legs and stood up. It was a relief to be able to look away from the grotesque, distressing images on the screen.
Kootie hurried to the door and peered out through the lens. “It’s him,” he said as he unchained the door, “alone.” He pulled the door open.
Mavranos brought in with him the smells of crushed grass and cold pier pilings, and Angelica thought she could see the stale room air eddy behind him as he strode to the ice chest and crouched to lift out a wet can of Coors.
“I found our place,” Mavranos said shortly, after popping the top and taking a deep sip. “It’s hardly more than walking distance from here. I found it at sunset, but I’ve spent all this time making sure I wasn’t followed back here. There was a lot of local hippies dressed up as druids there—or druids dressed as hippies?—and I kept on seeing them after I left the place.”
He finished the can and crouched again to get another. “I’d see ’em on rooftops, and in passing buses, but each of ’em was looking at me, I swear, with no expressions at all on their faces, under the hoods. I finally lost ’em by buying a—hah!—a Jiminy Cricket latex rubber mask in Chinatown, and then wearing it while I rode the cable cars Washington-to-Mason-to-Jackson-to-Hyde in a windshield circle for about an hour.” He glanced at Angelica. “ ‘Windshield’—the olden-times word was ‘widdershins.’ ” He twirled a finger in the air. “It means moving counterclockwise, to elude magical pursuit.”
“I know what widdershins is,” said Angelica. “Contra las manecillas. So where is this place? Is it where the banker drowned?”
“No, it’s—well, you’ll see it tomorrow at dawn. It’s out at the end of the peninsula at the Small Craft Harbor, on the grounds of some yacht club; I had to step over a ‘No Admittance’ sign on a chain. It looks like an old ruined Greek or Roman temple. I asked about it at the yacht club—apparently the city planners had a whole lot of cemetery marble left over after they cleared out all the graveyards in the Richmond District in the thirties, transplanted the graves south to Colma, and so somebody set up this pile of … steps and seats and pillars and patchwork stone pavements … out at the end of the peninsula. Very windy and cold—and the compass needle had no time for my magnet or the north pole; I swear I could feel that compass twisting in my hand, so the needle could point straight down.”
His eyes moved past Angelica to the body on the bed, and when he gasped and darted a glance toward the Plumtree woman, Angelica knew he had seen the fresh blood smeared on Scott Crane’s jeans.
“She go messin’ with him?” Mavranos demanded. “Did her dad, I mean?”
Angelica took hold of his arm. “No, Arky. We decanted some of Crane’s blood into a bottle. We think she’ll have to—”
“Phlebotomy,” put in Kootie.
“Right,” Angelica agreed nervously; “it looks like she’ll probably have to, to drink some of Crane’s blood, to summon Crane, to draw him into her body tomorrow.”
Mavranos’s nostrils widened in evident distaste at the thought, and Angelica sympathetically remembered how the poor Janis personality had found herself suddenly in a body that was convulsing with nausea, after the Cody personality had first proposed the idea and then fled.
Mavranos glared around the room and ended up staring at the television, which for the last five minutes had been insistently showing some French-language hard-core pornographic movie.
“So you decided to distract yourself with some T-and-A,” he said sourly. “You psychiatrists figure this is wholesome entertainment for fourteen-year-old boys, do you?”
“T and …?” echoed Angelica. “Oh, tits and ass, right? Sorry—to me T-and-A has always been tonsillectomy-and-adenoidectomy.” With a shaky hand she brushed a damp strand of hair back from her forehead. “No, damn it, we’ve been trying to get this off the screen—we had the old black lady, for a few seconds—but now shaking the pennies and even pushing the buttons on the set won’t shift us from this channel.” She glanced at Kootie, who was studiously looking away from the screen but who had clearly been upset—even haunted, she thought—when the desperate, contorting figures had first appeared on the screen.
From far away out in the chilly darkness came the metronomic two-second moan of a foghorn.
“I been hearing that all day, seems like,” Mavranos said absently. “It’s the horn on the south pier of the Golden Gate Bridge. Two seconds every twenty seconds.” He sat down on the carpet and put down his beer can so that he could rub his eyes. “Okay,” he said with a windy sigh, “so did the old black lady have anything useful to say? She’s supposed to be our intecessor, and she’s been awful scarce.”
“She,” Angelica began; then, “No,” she said. I’ll tell you later, Arky, she thought. “Cochran and Plumtree have been working his homemade Ouija board, though, and—”
But Kootie spoke. “She said, ‘The debt-payer is always a virgin, and must go to India still a virgin.’ ”
Angelica could feel her face go slack with exhaustion; she was certain that this was a verbatim recollection of the old woman’s words. Then she made herself raise her head and put on a quizzical expression. “Yes,” she said briskly, “that’s what she said.” Oh, it won’t be you, Kootie, she thought. I won’t let it be you, don’t worry. Oh, why the hell are we even—
“Damn this garbage!” she burst out, and she sprang to the wall and yanked the television’s plug right out of the wall socket.
And then she just blinked from the cord in her hand to the television screen, on which the sweaty bodies still luminously strained and gasped. Her chest went suddenly hollow and cold a full second before she was sure she had pulled out the right plug.
Mavranos had got to his feet and stared at the wall behind the dresser the television sat on, and now he even waved his hand across the back of the set as though verifying a magic trick.
“Lord,” he said softly, “how I do hate impossible things. Pete, let’s carry this abomination down to the truck, and—”
But at that moment the screen went mercifully dark at last.
“Bedtime for the satyrs and nymphs,” Mavranos said. “And for us too, I think.” He looked toward Plumtree and Cochran. “What did the Ouija board say?”
Plumtree shifted on the bed. “We asked to talk to anyone who knew about this … situation of ours, and—well, you tell them, Scant.”
Cochran reached behind Plumtree to pick up one of the many sheets of Star Motel stationery. “ ‘Canst thou remember a time before we came unto this cell?’ ” he read. “ ‘I do not think thou canst, for then thou wast not out three years old.’ ”
“I do think that’s your subconscious speaking,” Angelica said to Plumtree. “Or the core-child, the traumatized personality: the poisoned comatose girl in your Snow White scenario, or the battered lady bus driver in Cody’s Dirty Harry version.” Angelica looked at Mavranos and shrugged. “God knows why it’s in that Shakespearean language—Pete’s pretty sure it’s from The Tempest, the exiled king Prospero talking to his daughter Miranda.”
“Valorie always talks that way,” said Cochran. “She’s the oldest personality, and I think she may be—” He hesitated, and then said, “I think she may be the core-child.”
You were going to say dead, weren’t you? thought Angelica. You were right to keep that idea from her, whether or not it’s true.
Quickly, so as not to let Plumtree think about Cochran’s momentary hesitation, Angelica asked him, “Why does Janis call you Scant?”
Cochran glanced at the back of his right hand and laughed uncomfortably. “Oh, it’s a childhood nickname. I grew up in the wine country, doing odd jobs around the vineyards, and when I was ten I was in a cellar when one of the support beams broke under a cask of Zinfandel, and I automatically stepped forward and tried to hold it up. It broke my leg. The support beams are called scantlings, and the cellarmen told me I was trying to be a proxy scantling.”
“Atlas would have been a good name, too,” remarked Kootie.
“Or Nitwit,” said Mavranos, stepping away from the television. “Angelica, you and Miss Plumtree can sleep on the Ouija-board bed by the bathroom after you clear the pizza boxes off it, with her on the bathroom side, away from Crane’s body; and we’ll tie a couple of cans to her ankle so as to hear her if she gets up in the night. Cochran can sleep on the floor on that side, down between the bed and the wall. Kootie can sleep over by the window, and Pete and I will take turns staying awake with a gun; well, I’ll have a gun, and Pete can wake me up fast. At about five we’ll get up and out of here.”
“If that TV comes on again during the night,” said Kootie in a small voice. He sighed and then went on, “Shoot it.”
“I bet my hands would let me do that, actually,” said Pete.
Valorie’s perceptions and memories and dreams were always in black-and-white, with occasional flickers of false red and blue shimmering in fine-grain moiré patterns like heat waves; and always there was a drumming or knocking, which she understood was an amplification of some background noise present in the soundtrack—or, if there was no actual sound to exaggerate, was simply imposed arbitrarily on the scene. Her dreams never had any fantastic or even inaccurate elements in them, aside from the constant intrusive percussion—they were just re-run memories—and her default dream was always the same, and all the Plumtree personalities experienced at least the last seconds of it whenever she did:
Her mother was wearing sandals with tire-tread soles, but in the dream they rang a hard clack-clack from the sidewalk concrete, and Plumtree’s little shoes and shorter steps filled in the almost reggae one-drop beat.
“They’ve painted a big Egyptian Horus eye on the roof,” said her mother, pulling her along by the hand. “Signaling to the sun god, Ra, he says. All the time Ra Ra Ra! But he blew his big play at Lake Mead on Easter, and nobody can pretend anymore that he’s gonna be any kind of king.”
Plumtree couldn’t see the men dancing on the roof of the building ahead of them, but she could see the bobbing papier-mâché heads that topped the tall poles they carried.
The sun burned white like a magnesium tire rim, straight up above them in the sky, at its very highest summer-solstice point.
“You stay by me, Janis,” her mother went on. “He’ll want to do the El Cabong bang-bang, but he won’t try anything with me today, not if his own baby daughter is watching. And—listen, baby!—if I tell you to run along and play, you don’t go, hear? He won’t hit me, not with you there, and he can’t … well, not to talk dirty, let’s just say he can’t—okay?—unless he’s knocked me silly, kayoed me past any ref’s count of ten. As close to dead as possible. I never even met him before he—I didn’t even meet him during, I was in a coma when he—when you stopped being just a glitter in your daddy’s evil eye. Dead would’ve been better, for him, but if you knock ’em dead you can’t knock ’em up, right? Never mind.”
On the sidewalk in front of the steps up to the door her mother stopped. “And what do you say,” her mother demanded, “if he says, ‘Baby, do you want to leave with your mother?’ ”
Plumtree was looking up at her mother’s backlit face, and the view blurred and fragmented—that was because of tears in her eyes. “I say, ‘Yes,’ ” Plumtree said obediently, though the cadence of her voice indicated an emotion.
Plumtree’s eyes focused beyond her mother—above her. Way above her.
This was the part of the dream that the other Plumtree personalities always remembered upon awakening.
There was a man in the sky, his white robes glowing in the sunlight for a moment; then he was a dark spot between the girl on the pavement and the flaring sun in the gunmetal sky. Plumtree opened her eyes wide and tried to see him against the hard-pressure glare of the sun, but she couldn’t—he seemed to have become the sun. And he was falling.
“Daddeee!”
Plumtree pulled her hand free of her mother’s, and ran to catch him.
The clattering clopping impact drove her right down into the ground.
Cochran was jolted out of sleep and then rocked hard against textured wallpaper in the darkness, and his first waking impression was that a big truck had hit whatever this building was.
Carpet fibers abraded his face, and a mattress was jumping and slamming on box springs only inches from his left ear; he couldn’t see anything, and until he heard shouting from Mavranos and abruptly remembered where he was and who he was with, Cochran was certain he was back in the honeymoon motel room behind the Troy and Cress Wedding Chapel in Las Vegas in 1990, again enduring the tumultuous escape-from-confinement of the big man in the wooden mask.
“Earthquake!” someone was yelling in the pitch blackness. Cochran sat up, battered by the mattress that was convulsing beside him like a living thing, and then he scrambled forward on his hands and knees until his forehead cracked against some unseen piece of furniture—the dresser the television had been sitting on, probably. The pizza boxes tumbled down onto his head, spilling crumbs and crusts.
“Mom!” yelled Kootie’s voice. “Mom, where are you?”
Two shrill voices answered him: “Here!”
Light flooded the room, just yellow electric lamplight but dazzling after the darkness. Squinting, and blinking at the trickle of blood running down beside his nose, Cochran saw that Angelica was standing beside the door with her hand on the light switch, and that Mavranos was crouched between the beds holding his revolver pointed at the ceiling. Kootie and Pete Sullivan stood beside Angelica, staring at the bed with Plumtree on it.
The bed was still jumping, the bedspread flapping like manta-ray wings, and Plumtree’s body was tossing on it like a Raggedy Ann doll—even though the rest of the room had stopped shaking.
“Omar!” grated a shrill, keening voice from between Plumtree’s clenched teeth. “Damn your soul! Stop it, take one of the girls, Tiffany or Janis, just let me go!” The three empty beer cans that Mavranos had wired to her ankle with a coat hanger were shaking and clattering.
Kootie has provoked the Follow-the-Queen sequence, Cochran thought; he did it when he yelled for his mother. Next card up is wild, whatever you declare it to be. Dizzy and light-headed, Cochran opened his mouth.
“Nina!” he called hoarsely.
“Omar, I will kill any child conceived in this way!” screamed the voice out of Plumtree’s mouth. “God will not blame me!”
It hadn’t worked.
Cochran’s bruised forehead was chilly with sweat. “J—” he began; then, “Cody!” he called.
At first he wasn’t sure the card he had declared would be honored, for though Plumtree’s eyes sprang open she was now gasping, “In the name of the father, the sun, the holy ghost!” Then she had rolled off the spasming mattress and scrambled across the carpet to the front door, the beer cans snagging in the carpet and hopping behind her.
“Whoa,” said Mavranos.
The mattress flopped down flat and stopped moving.
Mavranos stared at the bed with raised eyebrows. “I,” he said, as if speaking to the bed, “was talking to Miss Plumtree.”
Cochran half-expected the bed to start jumping again at this explanation, but it just lay sprawled there, the mattress at an angle now to the box springs and the pillows and blankets tumbled in disorder.
“Get back by boyfriend,” Mavranos told Plumtree.
Somewhat to Cochran’s surprise Plumtree had no rude retort, but just obediently stepped back toward the bed; though she did shake her ankle irritably, rattling the attached cans. She was smacking her lips and grimacing. “Jeez, was my female parent on? I hate her old spit. I gotta gargle, excuse me.” She hurried past Cochran into the bathroom, and he could hear her knocking things over on the sink.
The light in the room was flickering, and when Cochran looked around he saw that the television had come on again, possibly because of having been jolted in the earthquake. Again the screen showed a glowing nude man and woman feverishly groping and sucking and colliding.
Mavranos stepped back to see behind the set, and frowned; clearly the cord was still unplugged.
“Could you get me a beer, Angelica?” he said, holding out his left hand and not taking his eyes off the television. He was gripping the revolver in his right hand, and Cochran wondered if he might actually shoot the TV set, and if he’d think of muffling the shot with a pillow.
Angelica leaned over the ice chest and fished up a dripping can; she popped it open and reached over to slap it into his open palm.
“Thanks.” Mavranos tilted the beer can over the ventilation slots on the back slope of the television set, and after a few seconds of beer running down into the set’s works the picture on the screen abruptly curdled into a black-and-white pattern like a radar scan, with a blobby figure in one corner that looked to Cochran like a cartoon silhouette of a big-butted fat man with little globe limbs, and warts all over him; and the sound had become a roaring hiss that warped and narrowed to mimic whispered words: et … in …. arcadia … ego …
Then it winked out and was dark and inert, a wrecked TV with beer puddling out from the base of it. Mavranos absently drank the rest of the beer and clanked the can down on the dresser.
For several seconds no one spoke, and the distant foghorn moaned out in the night.
Mavranos raised the gun barrel for silence while he stared at the watch on his left wrist.
Cochran began to let the muscles in his shoulders relax, and he gently prodded the bloody bump on his forehead.
The foghorn sounded again, and Mavranos lowered his arms. His face was expressionless. “What time is it?” he asked.
“You were just staring at your watch!” said Angelica.
“Oh yeah.” Mavranos looked at his watch again. “Quarter to five, apparently that’s showtime.” He sighed shakily and rubbed his left hand over his face. “Let’s mobilize. Angelica, get your witchy shit together and have Pete carry it downstairs and into the truck while you cover him with your .45, and don’t forget to bring that Wild Turkey bottle with Scott’s blood in it. Don’t put stuff in the back bed, though—we’ll be carrying Scott down and putting him back there. I’ll drive the truck, and Pete can drive Mr. Cochran’s Granada—”
Plumtree had stepped out of the bathroom, and Cochran could smell the Listerine on her breath from a yard away, though he was ashamed to meet her eye. She dug in the pocket of her jeans and pulled out a bundle of bills.
“Kid,” she said to Kootie. When he looked up, she thrust the bills out toward him. “This is yours. A hundred bucks—long story, don’t ask. I want to give it to you now, in case we get … in case we don’t quite meet again.” Cochran thought there was gruff sympathy in her voice. “No hard feelings.”
Kootie was holding the little yellow blanket that bald-headed Diana had given him back in Solville, but he reached across the bed with his free hand and took the money. “Thank you, Janis Cordelia Plumtree,” he said.
“And Janis Cordelia can ride shotgun in the Granada,” Mavranos went on rapidly, “with Angelica behind her ready to shoot. Come on, everybody, up! I want us out of here in five minutes.”
Angelica snatched up her knapsack and grabbed the Wild Turkey bottle. “What’s the hurry, Arky?” she asked irritably. “Sunrise isn’t for another hour or so, and you said the place is walking distance from here.”
Mavranos had peered through the peek hole and now unchained the door and pulled it open. “That foghorn, just now—it’s sounding every fifteen seconds, not twenty, and it’s a different tone. It’s a different foghorn.”
Pete was squeezing the battery charger’s clamps off the terminals of one of Mavranos’s car batteries and then lifting the battery in both hands. “So?” he asked breathlessly. “Maybe the wind’s from a different direction.”
“They don’t vary that way, Pete,” said Mavranos impatiently, “or they wouldn’t be any good as foghorns, would they? We’re—we’re Scott’s army, this king’s army, and in that sense we won’t truly exist until the potential of his resurrection becomes an actuality. Our wave-form has to shake out as one rather than as zero. And I think—this wrong foghorn makes me think—that we’re a fragmented waveform right now, that psychically we’re somewhere else too, as well as here in a motel on Lombard Street.”
“So,” said Angelica, spreading her hands, “what do we do?”
“What are you asking me for?” Mavranos snapped. “All I can think of is for us to go to this crazy cemetery temple on the peninsula, in the wrong gear and without even our TV-star intercessor, and hope we can catch up to ourselves.” He darted a glance around the room. “Where’d Kootie go?”
“He’s right outside,” said Angelica. “He waved his hand in front of his face like he wanted fresh air, and he stepped out.” She hurried to the door, calling, “Kootie?”
She leaned around the doorjamb to look, and then she had lunged outside, and Cochran heard her voice from out on the railed walkway: “A note!” she yelled. “Shit—‘Can’t be with you for this—sorry—’ Pete, he’s run away!”
Kootie had already tiptoed down the stairs and sprinted across the dark parking lot to the Lombard Street sidewalk, and was now hurrying to a cab that had pulled in to the curb after he had, without much confidence, waved to it. He levered open the back door and scrambled in. Better than hiding behind a Dumpster somewhere, he thought nervously, and I can afford this now, thanks to Miss Plumtree. He hiked up on the seat to stuff Diana’s baby blanket into his hip pocket.
The cab driver was an elderly black man who stared at him dubiously over his shoulder. “You okay, kid?”
“Yes,” panted Kootie. “Drive off, will you?”
“I don’t like hurry.” As if to prove the point, he cocked his head to listen to a dispatch on his radio. “And I don’t like driving people who turn out to not have any money,” he went on finally. “Where did you want to go?”
Kootie bared his teeth in impatience and tried to remember the name of any place in San Francisco. “Chinatown,” he said.
“You better give me ten dollars up front, kid—I’ll give you the change when we get there.”
Hurriedly Kootie dug out of his pocket the money Plumtree had just given him, and he held the bills up to the window to be able to see the denominations by the glow of the nearest streetlight. He peeled off two fives and thrust them over the top of the front seat to the driver.
At last the driver shifted the car into gear and accelerated away from the curb. Kootie pressed his lips together and blinked back frightened tears, but he didn’t look out the back window.
Angelica trudged back up the stairs from the parking lot. Many of the motel rooms had their lights on after the earthquake, and the doorway at which Mavranos stood wasn’t the only one that had been opened.
“No sign of him,” she told Mavranos when she had stepped inside and closed the door. “There was a taxi driving away—he might have been in it, or not, and I couldn’t see what company it was anyway.” She gave Plumtree a look that was too exhausted to be angry. “Thanks for giving him getaway money.”
Plumtree narrowed her eyes, then visibly relaxed and just pursed her lips. “He was going anyway—read the rest of the note!—and if the money did let him take a cab, you should be glad he’s not walking, in this neighborhood at this hour.”
“Gimme the note.”
Pete Sullivan wordlessly passed to Angelica the piece of Star Motel stationery that had been weighted down with a motel glass on the walkway outside the room, and Angelica forced her tired and blurring eyes to focus on the clumsy ballpoint-ink letters:
MOM & DAD & EVERYBODY—I CAN’T BE WITH YOU FOR THIS. I’M SORRY. I KNOW I’D HAVE TO DO THE BLOOD DRIKING—HOPE YOU CAN READ THIS, I DON’T TURN ON THE LIGHT—JESUS I HOPE TV STAYS OFF—I’D HAVE TO DRINK THE BLOD, & I CANT DO IT AGAIN: LET SOMEBODY HAVE ME—& ME BE OUT OF MY HEAD. EDISON IN 92, NEVER AGAIN, ID GO CRAZY. I HAVE/HAVE NOT TAKEN THE TRUCK. I DO NOT HAVE A KEY TO THIS ROOM BUT I’LL BE BACK AFTER. I’VE GOT A LITTLE MONEY, ENUFF. I LOVE YOU DONT BE MAD KOOTIE
Angelica looked up at Mavranos. “I’ve got to stay here.”
Mavranos started to speak, but Pete Sullivan overrode him. “No, Angie,” he said loudly. “We’ve got to go through with this thing, this morning. We’ve got Plumtree, and we’ve got the dead king—and we need a bruja. And Kootie knows where we’ll be, he heard Arky describe the place—if he wants to find us, that’s where he’ll go, not here.”
“Just what I was gonna say myself,” growled Mavranos.
Plumtree had sat down on the bathroom-side bed, and was untwisting the coat-hanger wire from around her ankle. “You don’t mind if I get rid of the house-arrest hardware now, do you? Me, I’m glad the kid’s out of it.”
She tossed the wired pair of beer cans aside and straightened up, then looked around and chuckled softly. “Do you all realize what we’ve done to this room? Burnt the rug and now stomped old pizza crusts into it, blasted the bed, poured beer in the TV—at least Janis made it to the toilet to puke last night. There’s even a lot of shed black dog hair on the beds! I’m glad it’s no credit card of mine this is on.” For a moment her face looked very young and lost, and Angelica thought of the little girl who had been hospitalized because the sun had fallen out of the sky onto her. “Get your Wild Turkey bottle and let’s go,” Plumtree whispered. “And please God I still be here by lunchtime, and Crane be alive again.”
“All of us still alive at lunchtime,” said Mavranos, nodding somberly. “Amen.”